Half Life
by i love alex
Summary: They're standing face to face. A foot apart. Seconds, and he could be touching her. They are seconds apart.


A/N: Little fic based around the alternative universe visions.

Enjoy!

* * *

They're standing face to face. Feet apart. Seconds, and he could be touching her. They are seconds apart.

Minutes.

Hours.

A lifetime.

What if he had gone an entire lifetime apart from her?

Elena bites down hard on the tip of her tongue, trying not to cry. This whole day had gone by without such an emotion as grief, caught as she had been beneath heavy, deep sleeps and flooded by visions of herself with Stefan, and their children. A life she could've had, a life she desperately wanted at one point or another.

She hadn't time to feel grief.

But now, as he shares what this day has done to him, what being immersed continuously by the dreams, by that life has done to him, his face completely full of it: anguish, exhaustion, a weakness almost...it befalls on her and she feels it now, feels the imminent collapse coming. The imminent sorrow.

The mourning already here.

She watches as his lips tremble, perhaps on the cusp of forming words but she knows him and there aren't words, he's too tired.

There are no words for this.

_"If you could have any career, be anything you could ever dream to be, what would it be and why?"_

_Stefan looks up from his worn out, much loved copy of Gray's Anatomy and instead directly into the eyes of a girl he recognizes from a couple of his classes, one of them being english. The question she is asking him is one that was posed to them as the homework assignment for the week. Find a stranger and ask them the question and get them to be specific. Then with your detailed account, write an entire story based on that person fulfilling their dreams._

_He thinks of her name: Elena and smiles, he knew who Elena was, or at the very least, definitely knew her name. He closes his book and holds up the cover._

_"Doctor." He says, plain and simple and with her hands on her hips, she furrows her brow, seemingly unsatisfied by that answer._

_"I have to write an entire story about you 'fulfilling' your hearts desire, Stefan Salvatore. You gotta give me more than that."_

_Her name was Elena and she had brown hair and brown eyes and loved writing. They had never spoken a word to one another before this afternoon but he already knew three things about her and within seconds of being near her, up close and all alone, he wanted to know so much more._

_"Okay. How about we go grab a coffee and I'll tell you everything you wanna know. What do you think?"_

_"i think…" She starts, and takes the book from his hands, her smile now so warm and comforting, he wonders how on earth he hadn't noticed it before, "I'd like to write your story very much."_

Something, perhaps a squirrel, creates a clammer outside and the noise, the first to break the silence is like the startled undoing of something that was thought to be firmly tied together. Stefan swallows, trying to keep his face from breaking, from his chest, from his entire body, just, breaking. He swallows again and holds her eyes, allows them to penetrate his, allows himself to breathe so he can speak.

"What…what did you see?"

She doesn't know if she can word it but she would be lying if she said she wasn't as curious as he was to find out. To see if the visions they'd be plagued with this entire day were possibly the same.

"If you're in hell, I'm in hell too."

"We dated, fell in love. Got married and our children…our children, we had two. A boy and a girl…" Her voice dies out in her throat; she didn't need to finish. He looks away but doesn't bother brushing off the few tears that had slipped down his cheeks. There was her answer.

It was the same, it had been exactly the same.

I am in.

Hell too, she thinks, feeling as she stood there, that she was falling and falling and falling.

_He should be nervous, or maybe feel far less assured. But the box is unopened in his hand and her smile is already wide and bright and he's known for a long while now that he was going to ask the girl he fell in love with at 15 to marry him._

_"Let's go. Tonight. Let's go and get married right now." She jumps into his arms, kissing him long and hard and he's laughing and smiling and spinning them around._

_"Okay.'" He tells her and brings her back to the ground, holding her so close, oh how long he has waited to marry her, "Let's go get married."_

Some of the visions, the dreams, were stronger and more detailed than others. Some were blurs, short and succinct and others were subversive - from smells and sounds, to the way things felt under her fingertips as she touched them: the ring on her left hand, their daughters hair, Stefan's hands, her pregnant belly.

"Why do you think they stopped?" She asks tentatively after a few minutes have passed. They had moved to the couch, sitting opposite one another, shot glasses full of blood in both their hands.

She doesn't really need an answer but wants to keep talking. Wants to hear his voice. She doesn't want to be alone in this; they can't be alone in this.

Stefan, who had been focused on the fireplace, looks to his glass. It's hard to read his expression but she can guess what it is that he's thinking about. In their dreams of being human, blood no longer had any bind nor captive hold on top of him. The irony of it, she vaguely marvels, how death as a human could claim them but that it still felt infinitely more freeing than knowing as a vampire you could live forever.

"The travelers probably broke the spell." He says quietly and a silence falls over the room again.

Stefan wanted to get up and leave. This room. This town. Flee across an ocean, maybe two. Walk and run and swim, miles and miles but knew even if he did. Even if he flew, all those miles and miles, over oceans, his heart, a beacon, aching and aching, could not live any life without her. The beat. The pulse. They belonged with her.

"It wasn't supernatural." He suddenly says and Elena startles at the immediate volume of his voice. She looks to him, eyes questioning only for a second until she realizes what he meant.

"I know." She tells him softly, already beginning to see the signs of a raging fire creating a dangerous heat within him.

"I spent so much time away from you. Without you. I was with other women, Katherine, Rebekah, others. Maybe I was meant for you and maybe you were meant for me because of some curse but you're so stubborn and headstrong, it was maddening, and we would fight and there were times I didn't want to even look at you."

Elena stands, starting to come around the small table between them but he moves before she can get too close, pacing now the floor.

"You've broken my heart, you've become my friend and I've hurt you and left you. None of that was pre designed or destined." He's stopped directing any of his words to her, the room instead filling with his turbulence and turmoil, the rage of it all; he has left her in this moment completely and she can only stand at the edge, hoping, waiting, for him to return.

This fire could not be cooled, it needed to burn. The truth it's fuel.

Everything they had ever had that was real. Every fight. Every night and day and the people that had separated them. None of that had ever been written to be felt between them. Each time his thumb would be at her cheek, each time she would hold up his head, too weak to lift it himself. Every defeat had been theirs, real and unbearably unfair.

"I only ever wanted…" His voice breaks and she nods and whispers, so ready to catch him, so ready to be caught herself, I know, I know, I know, that life, babies and marriage and dreams, the perfection of a scripted happiness was all he ever wanted and for a time, perhaps still, all she ever wanted too.

Instead, getting this. Torment and blood, grief and impossible separation.

"I wanted it too, Stefan. I wanted it all. I wanted it all with you too."

_She's pregnant with her long thick hair draped down her back, the ends dipped in the water as she sat naked in the bath tub. He's standing over the sink and shaving the curve of his chin, glancing over at her every now and then amid a conversation they were having about names, middle names and first names. Boys names and girls names._

_The bath is warm, the bubbles so thick they cover her up to her shoulders and they prickle and pop as she moves, wherever she goes._

_"Can you imagine if we had never met?"_

_Stefan washes up at the sink and begins to discard his clothing. He slips into the bathtub across from her and stretches out his legs, poking her gentle and being careful of her stomach. He doesn't answer until he's got one of her feet in his hands, beginning to squeeze it._

_"I don't think I ever have."_

_One of Elena's eyebrows rises in mild disbelief and she smiles, a loopy, sloppy grin because she was warm and lazy and her saw feet felt good under the pressure of his fingers._

_"Even when you've been so angry with me you can't even stand to be in the same room?"_

_Stefan stops rubbing her feet immediately and looks pointedly at her._

_"Oh wait."_

_Elena kicks him so bubbles and water go flying and he laughs against her giggles, moving now and adjusting their bodies so he can be behind her, her back resting against his chest. She takes his hand and their fingers knot, coming to sit at the crest of her rising belly._

_"The second I met you I knew anything else, everything else wasn't an option. There was never going to be any other life as big, as good for me as this one."_

_He kisses her head as he finishes and keeps it there, his heart still quivering from when she had asked the very question to begin with, the mere notion of it enough to begin a nervous pounding beneath his chest._

_I couldn't bear it, not to be with you, make babies with you, grow old with you, I couldn't bear it at all._

"Can I stay here tonight?"

He hasn't said a word and it's been almost 5 minutes. From where she's sitting, her back to a wall and her legs spread out across the carpet, she can only just make out his body in the growing darkness of the room, neither of them bothering with lights or a fire.

If he could stand and walk and lift her up, he would. He would walk to her and help her and bring her to his bed. His chest hurts, his feet, his shoulders, the ground felt barely stable enough to support his weight as he sat against the arm of the couch, slumped forward, trying to not give in to the growing need to lie with his chest to the floor.

"Yes," He hears himself say to her and it's a whisper that could be louder, stronger, he should be strong for her, "Please. Please stay."

_Stefan peeks around the corner of their children's bedroom, spotting his wife and their two year old asleep on the bed opposite the crib. With his own arms full, his daughter's head slung against his shoulder, he sneaks into the room, carefully leaning down to kiss both of them. Elena is the only one who wakes._

_"Hi." She whispers with a sleepy smile and she immediately wriggles over, lifting their son onto her stomach to make room for him to fit beside her until they're squished side by side, with their children asleep against them._

_"Did you agree to marry me with this thing attached, or were you just too blinded by love to notice?" Stefan rubs his daughters back, keeping her head tucked against his shoulder, feeling as she breathed in and out against his chest._

_"It was a two for one deal."_

_"Thought so."_

_Elena's almost asleep again, the cocoon they had created and the sounds of their children's own rest enough to draw her under before she can feel his hand take hers._

_"Thank you for writing our story." He whispers and just before things go blank, the colors and the sounds already beginning to disappear, she says, "Thank you for letting me."_

_Immediately things go to black._

"They stopped before we grew old, the visions, they stopped before we could see it all."

Stefan thinks sharing a bed might've been a bad idea. Her knees are just there behind the backs of his; he could reach behind him and grasp her. Take a hold. He starts to think about that last vision but stops before he gets too deep, anger instead lingering.

He didn't want to keep doing this.

"Would you want to see that? Would you want to see us old and together, death only months between each of us. One before the other because we died of a broken heart. Is that what you would've wanted?"

Elena has shut her eyes but it hasn't helped, hot tears have filled them and she feels the sure, heavy sting of shame and guilt bloom across her chest, both preventing her from moving as much as she wants to.

"I hate you." She spits venomously instead before she can stop herself and she wipes her nose and covers her eyes and tries to pretend she can escape into another room, another world, another life into them and away from him.

A minute passes and then. "I'm sorry." He whispers and reaches behind him where, like he knew he could, he can grab her and hold her and feel her there.

When she has stopped and her breathing was no longer labored, now just low and quiet rises and falls of air coming in and out of her lungs, she leans into him because it wasn't true and she didn't hate him.

"I hate this." Is what it is, so much she does but not him. Never him.

"I love you." And he wants to turn his body as he says it, so he can see her face through the darkness, something he did so often as he was drowning, it's become second nature to fall asleep nowadays to it there ready and waiting for him. "I love you so much, Elena." Her company and her words, her body and her touch. He loved it all. In friendship and as lovers, he loved it all. He loved her. He didn't need a dream life, he wanted it but never needed it. He just.

"Needed this." She finishes and though they could not see the other, truth radiated from the statement, his hand still on her knee and their bodies side by side. All I need is this.

Seconds.

Minutes.

An entire lifetime without her, he did not have to bear.

All I need, is you.

—-  
Fin.


End file.
